Top 150 Jon Ronson Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “For the first hundred years, as far as I could tell, all that happened in America was that various people named Nathaniel had purchased land near rivers.”

— Jon Ronson

102. “I would also say you can never reduce any person to a diagnostic label.”

— Jon Ronson

103. “It wasn’t easy to learn about Gustave LeBon. For being the father of such an enduring theory, almost nothing has been written about him. Only one man has ever tried to piece his life story together – Bob Nye, a professor of European intellectual history at Oregon State University.”

— Jon Ronson

104. “Maybe it was the trying so hard to be normal that was making everyone so afraid they were going crazy.”

— Jon Ronson

105. “Shame internalized can lead to agony.”

— Jon Ronson

106. “Google has the informal corporate motto of “don’t be evil”, but they make money when anything happens online, even the bad stuff.’ In.”

— Jon Ronson

107. “The idea of Donald Trump and Alex Jones and Roger Stone and Stephen Bannon having power over us – that is terrifying.”

— Jon Ronson

108. “But they’re being labeled bipolar. That’s an enormous label that’s going to stay with you for the rest of your life.”

— Jon Ronson

109. “I, personally, no longer take part in the ecstatic public condemnation of people unless they’ve committed a transgression that has an actual victim, and even then not as much as I probably should. I miss the fun a little. But it feels like when I became a vegetarian. I missed the steak, although not as much as I’d anticipated, but I could no longer ignore the slaughterhouse.”

— Jon Ronson

110. “Then I get worried that if anyone is really paying attention to Happy’s predilections, they might become wary of his wholesale compassion and suspect him of being an imaginary character, created by a journalist, to trick businesses into inadvertently revealing their data-trafficking practices. So I untick tigers.”

— Jon Ronson

111. “In a crowd we are “microbes” infecting everyone around us, a “grain of sand amid other grains of sand, which the wind stirs up at will.” We are impulsive, irritable, irrational:.”

— Jon Ronson

112. “Glenn Beck did not fall into line. He told his listeners that Trump was a “dictator in the making.”

— Jon Ronson

113. “Only a handful of therapeutic communities inspired by his Massachusetts ones exist in American prisons today. But, as it happens, one of them is situated on the top floor of the Hudson County Correctional Center in Kearny, New Jersey. And it is being quietly run by the former New Jersey governor Jim McGreevey.”

— Jon Ronson

114. “The common assumption is that public punishments died out in the new great metropolises because they’d been judged useless. Everyone was too busy being industrious to bother to trail some transgressor through the city crowds like some volunteer scarlet letter. But according to the documents I found, that wasn’t it at all. They didn’t fizzle out because they were ineffective. They were stopped because they were far too brutal.”

— Jon Ronson

115. “In the middle sat Brad Blanton. He was a large man. His shirt, open to his chest, was yellow-white, like his hair. With his sunburned face, he looked like a red ball abandoned in dirty snow.”

— Jon Ronson

116. “She summarized: “So. Don’t get shitfaced, don’t fist her ass, enjoy.”

— Jon Ronson

117. “My ideal world was the early days of Twitter, where everyone was curious about each other and everyone saw it as kind of a window into people’s lives where we could be compassionate and curious and empathetic and we could tell each other secrets.”

— Jon Ronson

118. “Let’s face it,” my Deep Throat had said to me, “nobody rules the world anymore. The markets rule the world. Maybe that’s why your conspiracy theorists make up all those crazy things. Because the truth is so much more frightening. Nobody rules the world. Nobody controls anything.”

— Jon Ronson

119. “The biggest lie,” he said, “is, The Internet is about you.”

— Jon Ronson

120. “In regular circumstances, 60 percent of criminal psychopaths released into the outside world go on to re-offend. What percentage of their psychopaths had? As it turned out: 80 percent. The Capsule had made the psychopaths worse.”

— Jon Ronson

121. “He had twenty followers. Some were people I knew from real life, who were probably wondering why I’d suddenly become so passionate about fusion cooking and candid about dreaming about cock.”

— Jon Ronson

122. “We were much more frightening than Judge Ted Poe. The powerful, crazy, cruel people I usually write about tend to be in far-off places. The powerful, crazy, cruel people were now us. It felt like we were soldiers making war on other people’s flaws, and there had suddenly been an escalation in hostilities.”

— Jon Ronson

123. “There is no evidence that we’ve been placed on this planet to be especially happy or especially normal.”

— Jon Ronson

124. “This is bizarre,” Dan said. “I find it really strange – the way you’re approaching this. You must be one of the very few people who have chosen to come on Twitter and use their own name as their Twitter name. Who does that? And that’s why I’m a little suspicious of your motives, Jon. That’s why I say I think you’re using it as brand management.”

— Jon Ronson

125. “He said his worst days were when he allowed himself to hope for a second chance. The best were when he knew it was over forever and his destruction was necessary as a deterrent to others. I.”

— Jon Ronson

126. “This place is packed with beautiful hipsters. While the Coney Island bombast radiated sincerity, everything here seems more ironic. When someone in the crowd ironically chants, ‘USA!’ someone else ironically chants back, ‘Mother Russia.”

— Jon Ronson

127. “Fiction seemed all about harnessing infinity. In fiction, when you walk into a restaurant and you sit down, there’s nobody there and the restaurant doesn’t exist. The restaurant is a horrific, never-ending nothingness. So you make scattershot decisions about what the restaurant might look like and the person you might be sitting with.”

— Jon Ronson

128. “The justice system in the West has a lot of problems,” Poe said, “but at least there are rules. You have basic rights as the accused. You have your day in court. You don’t have any rights when you’re accused on the Internet. And the consequences are worse. It’s worldwide forever.”

— Jon Ronson

129. “Discover the time of day when you write best, and write then. For me it’s about 7 am to noon. For other people it’s overnight. Try not to do anything other than write between those times.”

— Jon Ronson

130. “His idea was that humans totally lose control of their behavior in a crowd.”

— Jon Ronson

131. “So you faked it to give Zimbardo a better study?” I asked. “It was completely deliberate on my part,” he replied. “I planned it. I mapped it out. I carried it through. It was all done for a purpose. I thought I was doing something good at the time.”

— Jon Ronson

132. “I didn’t realize he was a drunk driver,′ I said. ‘The other superheroes inferred it was just a regular, random guy you were trying to force a taco onto. But still’ – I indicate the nearby crack dealers – ’the Taco Incident surely demonstrates how things can inadvertently spiral.”

— Jon Ronson

133. “At first, I did stories on people who were maybe just eccentric. Omar was a natural progression from that.”

— Jon Ronson

134. “What a brilliant cover story. In a success-obsessed society like this one, what’s the best rock to hide something under? It’s the rock called failure.”

— Jon Ronson

135. “One man was saying, ‘It cost me a new SUV for my wife,’” Andrew said. “Another said, ‘It cost me a cruise to the Bahamas and a new kitchen.’ Everyone was laughing.”

— Jon Ronson

136. “I’m not what you’d call a fearless type of person.”

— Jon Ronson

137. “Twitter wanted to become a more egalitarian justice system, but instead it became a draconian one.”

— Jon Ronson

138. “I thought about my own over-anxious brain, my own sort of madness. Was it a more powerful engine in my life than my rationality?”

— Jon Ronson

139. “Twitter hates tabloids, but Twitter is constantly acting like a tabloid, repeating the mistakes of the things we’re hoping to better.”

— Jon Ronson

140. “The world in which Alex is a leading voice – a loose collection of internet conspiracy theorists and nationalists and some racists – suddenly had a name: the “alt-right movement.”

— Jon Ronson

141. “I vaguely remembered hearing psychologists say there was a preponderance of psychopaths at the top – in the corporate and political worlds – a clinical absence of empathy being a benefit in those environments.”

— Jon Ronson

142. “Learning how to walk through walls was an ambitious but inexpensive enterprise.”

— Jon Ronson

143. “As a group they tend to be more charming than most people,” she said. “They have no warm emotions of their own but will study the rest of us.”

— Jon Ronson

144. “Their puffed-out cheeks are beetroot-red, making them resemble sweaty, meat-smeared squirrels.”

— Jon Ronson

145. “I put a video out,” Alex said, “a message to Trump. And then two days later he lays out the case. It’s like sending up the Bat Signal.” Was this true? It seemed unlikely, but when I got home I discovered that journalists had indeed spotted several occasions where Alex had said something on his show and Trump had said the same thing – right down to the peculiar phrasing – soon after.”

— Jon Ronson

146. “But on the extremist side I didn’t get any rejections at all. Everyone agreed to talk to me.”

— Jon Ronson

147. “If you couldn’t kill your adversaries, or keep them imprisoned for ever, there was surely only one option left in the Colonel Alexander canon: you change their minds.”

— Jon Ronson

148. “Given all of this, you’d think LeBon’s work might have at some point stopped being influential. But it never did. I suppose one reason for his enduring success is that we tend to love nothing more than to declare other people insane.”

— Jon Ronson

149. “The UFO community?” I said. “Why would government spies want to infiltrate that?” “Oh, Jon,” said Steven. “Don’t be naive.”

— Jon Ronson

150. “He did another experiment, the Startle Reflex Test, in which psychopaths and non-psychopaths were invited to look at grotesque images, like crime-scene photographs of blown-apart faces, and then when they least expected it, Bob would let off an incredibly loud noise in their ear. The non-psychopaths would leap with astonishment. The psychopaths would remain comparatively serene. Bob.”

— Jon Ronson